Friday, April 22, 2011

Hot cross happy ending

For those of you who've had a sleepless night worrying about my hot cross bun situation... allow me to provide a pictorial summary of my Good Friday.

8am. Wake up with a cold sense of impending disappointment. There's no way those Amy's Bread ones will be any good. I will have to mobilize the fallback plan. Hurry to Gristedes, our nearest and coincidentally most down-at-heel grocery, in search of the missing ingredient: mixed peel.

'Mixed peel' is what I wanted - rainbow coloured is what I got.

9am. Start the inevitable googling required when translating UK recipes for use in the US: grams into cups, substitutes for fresh yeast, etc etc. I'm getting good at this now, after learning the hard way.

10am. Toast the Amy's Bread buns, after picking the icing off. They are okay, but they toast a bit crispily, a bit too close to brioche. And they are way too round, like little hillocks, not nice squashy buns.

10.30am. Make my dough while on mute on a conference call, and leave it to rise. While it rises I pick the weird violent green bits out of the so-called 'Old English' mixed peel.

2pm. The dough has risen and the mixed peel filtered. I knead in the raisins and make some proper non-icing crosses and leave them to prove. Whatever that is.

3pm. How will I know they have proven (proofed? proved?)?

3.30pm. Decide if they haven't proved by now they never will. Time to bake. Start slagging off our new gas oven, as pre-emptive scapegoating move in case of bun failure.

4pm. Gloat to TLOML about how amazing my proper hot cross buns are.

4.10pm. Post this. And in case you're wondering, no, Good Friday is not a holiday in the US. So in between this production I did some important thought leadership and contributed to a number of gripping teleconferences. Another tough day in the office.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Transplanted to Los Angeles and then New York by The Love Of My Life (we’ll call him TLOML) - till I dragged him back to Britain. Writing about the cultural chasm, and our return to LA as a family of 3.